Google moon images shows triangular anomaly. What is it?

At first glance, it certainly appears a bit too symmetrical for a natural object. Some Internet sites have speculated that this might be either an alien spaceship, a base used by aliens from which to study Earth, or that it could even be a top secret moonbase created by humans.

The unusual object — photographed by NASA’s Clementine spacecraft, launched in 1994 — measures approximately 500 feet x 420 feet, and is located near the region known as Mare Moscoviense. Using the actual Google Moon coordinates of the object — 22º42’38.46″N and 142º34’44.52″E — Huffington Post checked it out for ourselves.

“I would suspect, from looking at it that [the original] object is a stitching artifact from Google Moon,” said Marc Dantonio, chief photo and video analyst for the Mutual UFO Network.

“A stitching artifact is a photographic anomaly that occurs due to the process by which many photos are aligned and put together to make a large photo mosaic.”

HuffPost also reached out to former FBI Special Agent Ben Hansen, the lead investigator of the Syfy Channel’s popular “Fact or Faked: Paranormal Files.”

“Is it possible someone might add data to an image depicting buildings and UFOs as a joke? If the raw images from NASA contain the same anomalies, we may be on to something,” said Hansen.

Photo credit: Google Earth

Photo credit: Google Earth

Moon base? Weird crater? More than one expert assumes it is a pixelation artifact. But it’s causing a buzz on alien speculation sites.

A bit of internet diving reveals that, despite the recent dates on the articles above, this is not a new anomaly. There are youtube videos and fringe website articles calling out the anomaly as far back as 2011 or earlier.

My favorite is people posting screenshots of it and saying that it’s not possible that it’s image artifacts because there are no image artifacts in it. Except that their image shows red and green splotches (very faint ones, but they’re there, including in the ones you posted). Those are artifacts caused by JPG compression. How do I know? The lunar image that is being shown was originally greyscale. No color. Therefore, the red and green (and blue, but much less obvious) rectangular splotches that look like classic JPG artifacts *are* JPG artifacts, proving that there are image artifacts in there.